Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Making Money from Open Source

After discussing the above on the Freegamer forums, I thought I'd start a brief list of ways to make money from Open Source, if only for my own reference:-

  • Put adverts onto your website
  • Ask for donations
  • Offer to implement features
  • Create virtual merchandise
  • Sell "acheivements" and "player upgrades"
  • Unlock features
  • Sell merchandise
  • Sell your community
  • Provide an offline version of the game (for free) but require a small payment for anything other than token access (e.g. unrated friendlies) on a PvP server.

Some of these are similar and are along the lines of "allow players to pay for more features".

The main obstacle to all of these is having a game popular enough so that people will actually pay money. Suggestions for solving this problem on a postcard please...